Hacking is the same thing as breaking and entering one's home. As Declan McCullough wrote back in the late 1990's, there is no such thing as "hacktivism", only vandalism.
What gets me about this case is the way that his father has been acting. He talks as if MIT committed a great sin by alerting law enforcement to his son's crimes.
He was recently the subject of an article in the Chicago Sun-Times as saying that MIT needed to apologize for its actions and to do what his son wanted them to do: make journal articles and academic journals free of charge. Given the fact that academic journals are pretty expensive to publish, if they were made free, pretty soon there would be no more academic journals around.
Aaron Swartz was a scumbag no different than kidnappers and other kinds of violent hoodlums.
Whom did this offend? And get erased?
ReplyDeleteActually, yours is the first comment. Oddly enough, the Mona Charen post has had roughly 20 times the traffic that this post has garnered.
ReplyDeleteLike your blog though.